A mangled walkway is all that's left along Manasquan beach after Hurricane Sandy plowed through three weeks ago. / MARY FRANK/Staff photographer

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WALLET BUSTERS

Regardless of where you live, expenses from Sandy could raise: » Local and county property tax rates. For towns that lost much of its high-paying tax base along the coast, inland property owners could see their taxes skyrocket to cover the tax losses, if state and federal aid can’t cover it all. Mix in overtime, debris removal and replacement of government equipment, and homeowners could be in for a sticker shock next year — in a state with the highest property taxes in the nation. See more “Wallet Busters” on Page AA4.

MORE WALLET BUSTERS

» Higher utility bills. JCP&L’s repair costs could top $400 million. All that will likely get passed on to ratepayers through higher monthly bills. New Jersey Natural Gas has no estimate for its replacement of gas lines, but its costs also will likely be passed on to ratepayers. » Insurance premiums. Federal flood insurance is already going up 25 percent to cover losses from past storms. For a homeowner who pays the average $600 a year, the increase will add on another $150. If a similar hike is used to pay for Sandy, the average rate could hit $1,000 a year.

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To envision the amount of damage left by superstorm Sandy, consider this: it would take an estimated 16,666 roll-off, 30-yard steel dumpsters to handle the debris the storm strew across Brick Township.

Lined end-to-end, those 22-foot long containers would stretch the length of the coastline in Monmouth and Ocean counties — about 70 miles.

And that’s just one town and a small piece of the pile.

The Army Corps of Engineers estimated Friday the storm will produce 3.5 million cubic yards of debris in all in New Jersey.

That amount would fill the old Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands — about 2.3 million cubic yards of space — one and a half times. If they were put in those dumpsters, the line would reach from New York City to Cleveland.

The task at hand of removing that debris is, by any measure, fearsome and costly.

“It’s just staggering,” said Paul Shives, administrator for Toms River, which had thousands of homes damaged or destroyed. “People are gutting homes and carting away carpeting, drywall and people’s memories — their lives.”

And taxpayers will be footing the debris removal bill for years.

The Brick Council authorized an $18 million emergency appropriation just for debris. Under the law, the township has five years to repay it and is now looking into issuing bonds. Union Beach in Monmouth County passed an emergency appropriation of $1.8 million. Toms River was set to approve a $35 million bond issuance Friday to get rid of its waste. The 2012 municipal budget in Toms River was about $100 million.

Brick Mayor Stephen Acropolis said the township is hoping to pay out just 10 percent of the $18 million after reimbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA paid 100 percent of eligible storm-related work for the first 14 days after New Jersey was declared a major disaster area on Oct. 30.

Now, FEMA picks up 75 percent of the cost and local municipalities must pay the 25 percent, state and federal officials said.

Ocean County announced Thursday that it plans to hire a debris-removal contractor and allow towns to enter into shared-services agreements with the county for the work to free up municipal employees, especially in small towns. The county would pick up the initial 25 percent cost and bill the towns later, according to Freeholder Director John C. Bartlett Jr.

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Local staging areas are being set up to separate building materials from “white goods” such as washing machines. Recycling can help a town’s bottom line.

“It’s going to save us a ton of money,” Acropolis said.

The 100 percent payout lit a fire under town managers. Hard-it towns like Brick and Union Beach moved quickly to marshal their forces to take advantage of the reimbursement. The 1,000 volunteers who poured into Union Beach after the storm, many of whom removed debris, helped, said Jennifer W. Maier, borough administrator.

In some places, that just wasn’t possible.

As of Tuesday, Brick carted away about 12,500 cubic yards of wrecked homes and other destroyed possessions, and about 7,300 cubic yards of brush, trees and other vegetative debris.

The Ocean County Landfill in Manchester is prepared to handle the added waste, said Britt Raynor, senior vice president of the landfill. The landfill has a life expectancy of 22 to 25 years and Sandy may claim just one of those years, he said.

Exhaustion sets in quickly when passing pile after pile of debris on curbs in waterfront communities across the Shore.

“It’s a psychological problem — you have to get it out as soon as possible,” said Alan Rubin, a New York attorney and government relations specialist who served as a disaster recovery strategist for FEMA in the aftermath of Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina. “And there are health problems after a while.”

Rubin said he has so far been impressed with the system unfolding for dealing with debris removal from Sandy.

“This seems to be the fastest I’ve seen from Katrina on,” he said. “They’re moving at a rapid pace.”

Utilities

Superstorm Sandy knocked Jersey Central Power & Light in the solar plexus, turning the lights off for about 1.2 million customers, including hundreds of thousands at the Jersey Shore.

The damage in Monmouth and Ocean counties, where more than 469,000 lost power, was among the most severe in New Jersey. High winds snapped trees and limbs, cutting power lines. Utility poles splintered like sticks. Transformers popped and sparked. Some substations were flooded.

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More than a week later, another 100,000 lost power when a nor’easter dumped heavy snow on the area.

At the height of its restoration efforts, the company said about 14,000 people were working to get the lights back on, including about 8,500 linemen, a number augmented by crews from utilities in 17 states as far away as California.

It was the biggest response in JCP&L’s history. And JCP&L’s customers will pay for it through rate increases.

It’s not yet known how much the repairs cost JCP&L or how much more customers will pay. The invoices from contractors and outside utilities are not in yet, JCP&L spokesman Ron Morano said.

“We are still assessing the damage and rebuilding and repairing the hardest hit areas of the barrier island, which will be included in the final costs,” Morano said.

But there are clues that power restoration from Sandy’s punch is a big ticket item.

In its third-quarter earnings report earlier this month, JCP&L’s parent company, Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. said the storm’s costs are expected to exceed $500 million. In a report, Paul B. Fremont, an equity analyst with investment bank Jefferies & Co. wrote 80 percent, or more than $400 million, is attributed to JCP&L.

“It is still a big number,” Morningstar analyst Charles Fishman said. “It was a devastating storm from a utility perspective, from any perspective.”

As a comparison, damage from Tropical Storm Irene and the freak snowstorm in October 2011 cost JCP&L $164 million in repairs.

FirstEnergy said it expects to recover 95 percent of Sandy’s cost from ratepayers.

Such a request would require approval from the state Board of Public Utilities.

State Rate Counsel Stefanie Brand said her staff and the BPU will look over the costs, seeking out items such as repairs that were already paid for or should have been made earlier. Another discussion is to determine what costs can be covered by insurance or repaid by FEMA.

“We will try to make sure they don’t have to pay a penny more than they need to,” Brand said. “These are the types of costs that are paid for through rates. There is not so much that can be done about it.”

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Wall-based New Jersey Natural Gas said its infrastructure of gas mains and lines were devastated on the barrier island areas between Bay Head and Seaside Park and all of Long Beach Island. The utility has shut off natural gas to those areas, a first in the company’s history. Service also was hit in the Bayshore region.

In total, 33,000 are without gas service.

“At this time, it is too early to estimate what the costs will be,” spokesman Michael Kinney said.

Similar to an electric utility, New Jersey Natural Gas also can recover its costs from ratepayers.

“We have begun implementing our restoration plan for Long Beach Island as well as Sea Bright,” Kinney said. “Our focus right now is to restore service to our customers as quickly and as safely as possible.”

Tourism

Can the Jersey Shore really be made whole again by Memorial Day?

It’s a $19 billion question that no one can answer right now.

That’s how much money tourism pumps into the Shore’s economy each year.

The good news is that two-thirds of that revenue comes from Atlantic and Cape May counties, which were spared the worst of Sandy’s destruction. Atlantic City’s casinos, Cape May’s bed and breakfast inns and Wildwood’s motels already are up and running.

However, the damage in Ocean and Monmouth counties, which together account for $6 billion in annual tourism revenue, was unprecedented — and is still being tallied.

No one questions the collective resolve to rebuild destroyed boardwalks, flooded restaurants and other impacted businesses in time for the all-important summer season.

But three weeks after Sandy, the scope and cost of that work are still being calculated.

“We’ll probably have a better assessment within a month or so. It’s too soon to tell,” said Grace Hanlon, executive director of the N.J. Division of Travel & Tourism.

“We’re taking the proactive (approach). When we know a place is open ... we’re going to push them as hard as we can through our state marketing campaign.”

On Long Beach Island, for example, summer rentals account for more than 95 percent of the area’s lodging inventory. But it’s not known yet how many of those 17,900 properties will be available this summer — and the clock is ticking. Most bookings occur in January and February.

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“The stakes are so high,” said Maggie O’Neill, a local real estate agent and president of the Ship Bottom Merchants and Professionals Association.

“Every time we bring in a rental, they go out to eat and they shop in the stores, and they play miniature golf, and those establishments pay taxes,” she said.

Visitors to Long Beach Island spent $1.2 billion in 2011, accounting for a third of Ocean County’s tourism revenue, according to a study by Rockport Analytics, of West Chester, Pa. That spending on LBI supported 20,000 jobs and generated $300 million in state and local tax revenue, the study found. Without those tourism dollars, the study noted, every household in Ocean County would have to pay an additional $826 per year in sales and property taxes.

O’Neill, for one, is optimistic that repairs can be made in time for the summer season. But many homeowners who rent out their properties in the summer still don’t know the full extent of the damage, she noted.

“What happens on LBI, at first blush, because of a lot of the structures are still standing, except maybe down in the Holgate area, you think, ‘Well, this isn’t too bad,’ ” O’Neill said. “Then you open the doors, and it’s all flood damaged. So there’s a lot of damage.”

The same is true for businesses on the island like Fred’s Beach Haven Diner, in Beach Haven. Last week, the 220-seat diner had all of its wooden chairs, which were covered in mold, and all of its upholstered booths, or what was left of them, stacked up on the curb. Inside the dining area, a crew had just finished stripping the walls and floors bare.

“It was easy to take out. I have no idea how long it will take (to rebuild),” owner Fred Schwing said. The kitchen looked a lot worse.

“It smells like the bay at low tide,” he said, taking a seat atop one of the 7-foot-tall, 300-pound refrigerators that was lying face first in a pungent puddle of water.

Farther north, on Ocean County’s barrier strip, the mile-long boardwalk in Seaside Heights has to be completely rebuilt. Is six months enough time to do the job?

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John A. Camera, the borough administrator, thinks so.

“It’s extensive, but I’m meeting with a contractor this afternoon,” Camera said Thursday. Judging by the activity he sees along the beachfront, business owners and amusement ride operators are moving forward with their rebuilding plans just as swiftly, he added.

“As long as our infrastructure is rebuilt, more people than ever are going to want to come to Seaside,” Camera predicted. The borough will celebrate its centennial in 2013.

“Nobody expected us to have to start from scratch for the next hundred years,” Camera said.

Hanlon, of the state tourism division, said while a more comprehensive damage assessment has to be completed, the pace of the cleanup so far is an encouraging sign that tourism losses can be minimized.

“Sea Bright alone, they thought it’d be weeks before they had the sand off the streets, and because of the volunteer efforts and the governor’s office, they’re making very good progress, better than they expected,” said Hanlon, a resident of Fair Haven.

“The storm didn’t hit in the middle of the season, so we have some time to rebuild,” she said. “So I’m going to be optimistic that, hopefully, we will be in good shape by Memorial Day weekend.”

Property Taxes

Brick Mayor Steve Acropolis thinks about a potential property tax nightmare: the damage or destruction of a significant part of the township’s tax base.

“It’s going to have a ripple effect that people are only just starting to think about,” he said.

The numbers are stark. The 1,300 homes on the township’s barrier beach area make up 12 percent of Brick’s ratable base, with a value of $1.3 billion. At least 60 of those homes no longer exist; they were burned to the ground when a fire raged through the Camp Osborn community.

Acropolis said many more homes on the barrier beach and also on the township’s mainland sections along Barnegat Bay sustained severe damage.

“You can’t shift that tax burden to all the people on the mainland,” Acropolis said. “People will go through the roof.”

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Acropolis and other mayors of Jersey Shore towns are suffering from what William G. Dressel Jr. calls fiscal shock.

Dressel, executive director of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities, uses the term to describe what local officials are feeling as they view the changed landscape of towns battered by superstorm Sandy.

In some Shore towns, a significant segment of the tax base either no longer exists or has been severely damaged. Since many of the properties that sustained the most damage were also those with the highest value, municipal finances are likely to be dealt a serious blow, as those property owners seek reassessments, Dressel said.

That could translate into a big rise in property taxes unless towns receive some kind of state or federal aid.

“What are the implications of this, and what effect is it going to have on the county tax rate, the municipal tax rate, the school tax rate?” Dressel asked.

State law allows property owners who have sustained damage to their homes after Oct. 1 to have them reassessed for the coming year. Under that law, homeowners have until Jan. 10 to notify their assessors of damage to their properties.

Normally assessments for the following tax year must be completed by Oct. 1.

“It’s for minor adjustments, like in the case of one home, that suffered a house fire,” Dressel said. “I don’t think that statute was intended, nor does it come close to addressing the magnitude of destruction of Sandy, on such a large scale.”

Members of the state’s assessors association as well as staff from the state Division of Taxation and the Department of Community Affairs have been working to come up with guidance for towns where massive requests for reassessments are likely.

Shore towns only now are beginning to undertake damage assessments, but already many officials are raising alarms about the impact on property taxes.

More than 100 homes in Manasquan were damaged. Two hundred of 525 lost in Mantoloking. In Keansburg, 2,000 families were displaced and many homes severely damaged. Those are only some of the initial damage estimates at the Shore.

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Jennifer W. Maier, Union Beach administrator, said 50 homes were destroyed in the borough and another 250 knocked off their foundations — all of them facing demolition.

Toms River Mayor Thomas F. Kelaher estimated his town may have lost 20 percent of its tax base, with almost all of the 7,000 houses on the Barnegat Peninsula damaged, some of them completely lost.

Ocean Gate Mayor Paul Kennedy guessed that 60 percent to 70 percent of the houses in his small borough sustained some kind of water damage after the Toms River spilled into its streets.

He wonders how his small borough will be able to afford to rebuild its battered boardwalk, a $1.5 million project, while trying to avoid a big increase in taxes that would strain the finances of residents who are trying to repair their flood-damaged homes.

“The next six months are going to be very difficult,” Kennedy said.

Insurance

New Jersey homeowners can expect to dig a little deeper to help insurance companies recoup the cost of Sandy, a storm so damaging that initial estimates place its hit to the insurance industry only behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

More costly, though, is what they will pay to renew their flood insurance through FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program. The program already plans to increase rates on secondary homes near the coast by 25 percent a year for the next five years to help return it to solvency. The average flood insurance policy costs a homeowner $600 a year.

“Most of the catastrophic loss has been built in the models, but companies will probably still have rate increases or capitalize on the (storm),” said Mike Chaney, the Insurance Commissioner for Mississippi.

Sandy’s destructive path was estimated to cost insurers as much as $20 billion, according to Eqecat, an Oakland, Calif.-based company that provides risk models for insurers.

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How much insurers will try to recoup through premium hikes isn’t clear. State regulators review requests for rate increases to ensure they are justified, said Marshall McKnight, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance.

The state this year has received 90 requests for rate increases and approved the full amount for all but four of them, according to a list provided by the department.

In the wake of Katrina, Chaney said, some policyholders saw rates double and triple. But observers hold out hope that the increase in homeowners’ insurance premiums will be modest since it appears that much of the damage was caused by flood.

Congress earlier this year renewed the National Flood Insurance Program for five years. In addition to the steep rate hike on secondary homes, the program will increase rates an average of 5 percent. Homeowners whose primary residence is in the highest-risk areas will see their premiums increase as much as 10 percent, according to the regulations.

“The flood insurance rates aren’t going to increase because of this storm; it’s been in place since (the new law was passed) July 1,” said David Wyrsch, president and owner of The Van Dyk Group, an insurance agency based in Long Beach.

Business Losses

Many business owners are realizing that they don’t have enough insurance to cover the cost of rebuilding their workplaces, restocking their equipment and making up for customers who have returned only slowly since Sandy struck, advocates said.

It has led them to acknowledge that ultimately they are going to have to pay for much of the recovery out of their own pockets.

“I’m going to be 55 years old. I don’t want to spend $30,000 to $40,000 to set up a new office and then in a few years I’m looking to cut back,” said Joe Napolitano, who didn’t have flood insurance to cover the damage to the equipment in his physical therapy business, Fitness and Rehab in Toms River. “It doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do.”

For most entrepreneurs, having adequate insurance is next to impossible, said Jackeline Mejias Fuertes, director of the New Jersey Small Business Development Center at Brookdale Community College in Middletown.

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Slow to recover since the housing bubble collapsed, business owners have scaled back on their insurance to save money, Fuertes said.

It has sent small business owners searching for ways to fill what for some could be a giant gap between what insurance covers and the total cost to restart their operations.

One obvious resource: The U.S. Small Business Administration offers businesses disaster loans of up to $2 million to repair physical damage and another $2 million to make up for economic injury caused by Sandy.

The loans have interest rates as low as 4 percent. They can be repaid over 30 years. But they’re no sure bet. Borrowers still need to go through an approval process that requires them to have an acceptable credit history and show they can repay the loan.

Through Nov. 13, the SBA in New Jersey had issued 27,339 applications to small businesses for physical damage and 303 applications for economic damage, the agency said.

Napolitano has applied for neither. He decided to move from Water Street to Kettle Creek Road, where he shares space with Lisa Saez, another physical therapist whose office wasn’t damaged.

That only alleviates one concern. The other? Will his patients go with him?

“This is all under the present situation where my volume of patients is down, I don’t know, right now 50 percent. How long is that going to take me to turn around? I don’t know.”

Your tax dollars

Recovering from superstorm Sandy will cost billions of dollars in New Jersey, and the federal government will likely fork over a good chunk of the money. In the end, every taxpayer in the U.S. will in some way or the other foot the bill for rebuilding the hard-hit areas of the northeast.

Gov. Chris Christie has yet to say how much federal funding New Jersey will be seeking, but New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last week that the Empire State wants $30 billion.

FEMA and its flood insurance program already owes the U.S. Treasury $18 billion for cleanup stemming from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or about $58 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. If Sandy doubles the debt load, the per person rate rises to $116.

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New Jersey’s economy has taken “a horrific hit” from Sandy, said Joseph J. Seneca, a professor at Rutgers University’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. “We will bounce back, but it’s been a very harsh blow and the pain, the suffering, the individual hardships are enormous on a personal basis as well as the losses of life. So it’s been a major disruption to the state’s economy.”

Sandy not only killed more than 30 people in New Jersey, the powerful and extremely large storm damaged or destroyed thousands of houses and other buildings, caused prolonged power outages for millions, wiped out numerous dunes and removed countless tons of beach sand. Recovery and restoration will take years, according to experts.

Seneca said Sandy imposed two kinds of “daunting costs.” The first is property damage to homes, businesses, inventories and public and private infrastructure, including bridges, highways, water systems and utilities, he said.

The second is damage to economic activity, as measured by income and sales tax revenues and unemployment insurance claims, he said.

On the positive side, New Jersey will get funding from private insurance, FEMA for emergency assistance and any special new federal programs, Seneca said.

The funding will arrive with some lag, but it will “last a significant period of time because it’s going to take a significant period of time for restoration and rebuilding,” he said.

“It’s a set of minuses and pluses and the balance remains to be seen going forward,” he said. “It’s a long road ahead and those insurance payments, both the private insurance, FEMA and the federal assistance, are not likely to ... cover all the initial public and private property losses.”

In August 2011, Hurricane Irene caused an estimated $15.8 billion in damages in the U.S., including more than $1 billion in New Jersey, according to reports. Insured losses amounted to $3 billion.

Following Irene, which struck New Jersey as a tropical storm and resulted in 11 fatalities, more than $275 million in federal disaster aid went to residents and others in New Jersey, according to government reports.

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The funding included nearly $152 million for housing-related repairs under the Housing Assistance Program and nearly $100 million in Small Business Administration low-interest disaster loans to 2,585 households and businesses, according to FEMA.

More than $13 million covered other needs, such as personal property, transportation, medical and dental expenses, replacing eyeglasses, and funeral and burial costs, according to FEMA. More than $10 million went toward rebuilding roads, bridges, utilities and other public infrastructure.

As of Friday morning, FEMA had distributed $179 million in grants for rental assistance, essential home repairs and other needs in New Jersey linked to Sandy, FEMA spokesman Chris McKniff said.

FEMA had received about 215,000 applications for assistance in New Jersey, including about 27,000 in Monmouth County and 45,000 in Ocean County, he said. FEMA hopes the number of applications goes a lot higher, he added.

“If you don’t register with us, we really don’t know if you need any assistance and, therefore, it’s very difficult for us to help you if you don’t register,” McKniff said.

Gary Colton, spokesman for the federal Small Business Administration’s Office of Disaster Assistance, said the agency had approved $1.8 million in low-interest loans in New Jersey as of Friday morning. The interest rate on most loans is 1.688 percent, he said.

Mary Goepfert, spokeswoman for the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management, said she didn’t have a ballpark estimate on Sandy’s overall damage in New Jersey.

But the state will explore all options for assistance for disaster survivors, she said.

Seneca, the Rutgers professor, said “I think it’s important to take time and get a defensible and credible estimate of (property damage) costs, and the worst thing you can do is to understate that because it becomes a basis for requests to the federal government. If you overestimate them, your number is not credible.”